Good morning. This is Duane. Did you realize that piano chord chartscan open a world of learning for you, and also a world of playing? Because with chord charts you can actually see what the notes are and what the chord looks like on the keyboard. I’ll show you exactly what I mean. I have a free newsletter, it’s called Secrets of Piano Chords and Chord Progressions, that people can sign up for. All you need to do is go to playpiano.com and sign up.

The reason I’m telling you about this now is because that newsletter is loaded with chord charts. Even if you don’t want the rest of the free course, you can get all those chord charts. I send them out every other day or something like that. For example, we’ll skip over the preliminary lessons but we’ll go to major chords. I just want you to see what a chord chart looks like. There’s a cheat sheet of all the major piano chords. You’ll see that they’re listed on the staff just like they’d be printed. Even if you don’t read music, there they are. Your hand is on a keyboard. It tells you exactly what the notes are as well as you can visualize of course what notes are being played on the keyboard. That’s the advantage here.

Now, there’s also, on every one of these, if you just press that little button you will hear me totally all about it and how it works and so on. Sometimes there’s added videos in it as well. Let’s go back to the index here. Let me show you a few more here. I cover inversions; those are chords upside down. There’s minor chords. Let me just show you what that looks like. Again, there’s an audio that goes with it. You can listen to it. It walks you through each chord there, what it looks like and what the notes are and so on.

Let’s go on to … there’s augmented chords, major 6th chords, minor 6th chord, 7th chords, major 7th chord, all the 9th chords, 11th chords, 13th, and specialized chords such as the diminished 7th chords. There’s only three of them by the way. Suspensions, alterations, slash chords. I had forgotten minor 7th chords but I came back and got them. You’d be wise to take the whole course because it’s free. It’s like a crash course in chords and chord progressions. You can see some of the chord progressions that we learn here. The 2-5-1 chord progression, the 6-2-5-1 chord progression, the “Blue Moon” chord progression, etc., the blues, the gospel chord progression, all kinds of things. Then we get into more advanced stuff as the course goes on. Even if you don’t take the course, you’ll probably want to sign up so you can get access to these chord charts because they’re invaluable.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this, and hope you sign up. Remember, all you do is go over to playpiano.com. When you get there, you’ll see a little box where you can sign up for these free online lessons, which include the chord charts. Okay, thanks.

Here is a blues riff you can play at any tempo – slow or fast – part or complete.

Good morning, this is Duane. It may be afternoon or night there, whatever, but it’s a morning for me; always record early in the morning. Today I’d like to share with you an easy blues riff that you can use at any speed. I say easy, it’s not easy if you’re a beginner, but it can be mastered and even part of it can be mastered. The nice thing about it is you can do it at any speed; any speed at all. Okay? What we’re going to do is we’re going to start … Let’s do it in the key of F. We can do it in other keys too, but I’m going to play the blues in F. (piano playing)

Okay, that kind of feeling. Now that was a slow blues. If I use a slow blues then I’d probably use a slow riff. What I’m going to do is I’m going to start on the flat fifth, I’m going to slide my finger off, or use my third and fourth fingers off B-flat to B-natural there. It’s really C-flat, but I’ve got to call it C-flat, but it looks like a B-natural, doesn’t it? Okay. Here it is: (piano playing) Got those four notes? Fourth, third, second, first. (piano playing) Let’s do that a few times. (piano playing) You see those four notes, I can use them interchangeably. I can use them straight down or I can jump around (piano playing).

Okay, now it continues. What you do is you cross your finger over; I’ll do this. (piano playing) You repeat the last four notes down there, but in between that you hit E-flat and C. So it’s … (piano playing). That encompasses basically two octaves, doesn’t it? (piano playing) There it is a little faster. You can use a super slow … (piano playing) I don’t play much blues anymore; I’m really sloppy. Anyway, that’s a little blues riff that you can use at any speed, and if you’re a semi-beginner, or advanced you can still use that. If you’re more advanced then you can play up, speed it up a bit. You can do that in other keys, too. As in the key of C. (piano playing) Basically the same notes because it encompasses the flat third and the flat seventh and the flat fifth of a major scale.

Okay, so there’s a little tip for today. Hope you enjoyed that, and if you do, come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our whole series of videos. Hope to see you there! Bye-bye for now.